This topic describes how to use OpenAPI Explorer to test the connectivity of an Express Connect circuit. OpenAPI Explorer provides web-based operations. You can call APIs in OpenAPI Explorer to test the connectivity of an Express Connect circuit that is used to connect your data center to Alibaba Cloud.

Background information

If your data center is connected to Alibaba Cloud through a primary and a secondary Express Connect circuit, you can test the connectivity of the secondary Express Connect circuit by disabling the primary Express Connect circuit for a limited time. To perform the test, you can enable and disable the VBR that is associated with the primary Express Connect circuit.

If your data center is connected to Alibaba Cloud through two Express Connect circuits, you can configure health checks and route priorities for the Express Connect circuits to enable automatic failover. If one of the Express Connect circuits is declared unhealthy, the system automatically routes network traffic through the other Express Connect circuit that works as expected. This ensures the high availability of your service. The time that is required to switch network traffic is affected by the number of routes in the virtual private cloud (VPC) that is connected to your data center. In most cases, the process takes less than 12 seconds.

The following table describes the configurations of a primary Express Connect circuit and a secondary Express Connect circuit. The Express Connect circuits are used to connect a data center to a VPC.
Configuration item IP address/CIDR block
VPC CIDR block 172.16.0.0/16
ECS instance IP address 172.16.1.25
Data center CIDR block 172.17.1.0/24
IP addresses for the gateways (configured on the primary VBR)
  • IP addresses for the VBR: 10.0.0.1/30
  • IP addresses for the gateway device in the data center: 10.0.0.2/30
IP addresses for the gateways (configured on the secondary VBR)
  • IP addresses for the VBR: 10.0.1.1/30
  • IP addresses for the gateway device in the data center: 10.0.1.2/30
On-premises server IP address 172.17.1.2
Health check configurations for the primary VBR
  • Source IP address: 172.16.1.2
  • Destination IP address: 10.0.0.2
Health check configurations for the secondary VBR
  • Source IP address: 172.16.1.3
  • Destination IP address: 10.0.1.2

Step 1: Check whether the primary VBR is active

  1. Log on to the Express Connect console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Physical Connections.
  3. Click the ID of the connection over the primary Express Connect circuit. On the details page, check whether the primary VBR is active.
    Figure 1. The details page of the connection over the Express Connect circuit

Step 2: Disable the primary VBR

  1. Log on to OpenAPI Explorer and enter TerminateVirtualBorderRouter in the search bar.
  2. Click TerminateVirtualBorderRouter.
  3. Select the region where the connection over the primary Express Connect circuit is created, and enter the ID of the associated VBR.
  4. Click Submit Request.

    The state of the VBR switches to Disabling. After the operation succeeds, the state of the VBR switches to Disabled.

    Note You can also click Terminate Connection in the Actions column of the VBR on the details page of the connection over the Express Connect circuit.

Step 3: Test the connectivity between the VPC and the data center when the primary Express Connect circuit is disabled

  1. In the data center, ping the IP address used by the primary VBR: 10.0.0.1. The result shows that the connection fails. This indicates that the primary Express Connect circuit is out of service.
    VBR
  2. In the data center, ping an ECS instance that is deployed in the VPC. The result shows that the connection is active.
    ECS instance
  3. In the data center, use curl to access the web port of the ECS instance. The result shows that the data center can access the web page of the ECS instance.
    ECS Web

Step 4: Enable the primary VBR

  1. Log on to OpenAPI Explorer, and enter RecoverVirtualBorderRouter in the search bar.
  2. Click RecoverVirtualBorderRouter.
  3. Select the region where the connection over the primary Express Connect circuit is created, and enter the ID of the associated VBR.
  4. Click Submit Request.

    The state of the VBR switches to Enabling. After the operation succeeds, the state of the VBR switches to Active.

    Note You can also click Recover in the Actions column of the VBR on the details page of the connection over the Express Connect circuit.

Step 5: Test the connectivity of the primary Express Connect circuit

In the data center, ping the IP address used by the secondary VBR: 10.0.0.1. The result after running the ping command to ping the VBR

References

You can call the DeleteVirtualBorderRouter operation to delete a disabled VBR in OpenAPI Explorer. For more information, see DeleteVirtualBorderRouter.